


Everything You Say (Sounds Like Gospel)

by enigma731



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Post-Avengers (2012), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Team Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-19
Updated: 2014-05-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 19:24:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1659689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enigma731/pseuds/enigma731
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Clint thinks he probably shouldn’t be surprised by anything after having his mind hijacked by a god, saving the world from actual aliens, and eating lunch across from Tony Stark. But even after all of that, he still isn’t expecting Captain America to visit him in the hospital. </em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything You Say (Sounds Like Gospel)

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to [andibeth82](http://archiveofourown.org/users/andibeth82/pseuds/andibeth82) and [samalander](http://archiveofourown.org/users/samalander/pseuds/samalander) for beta and cheerleading. Also thanks to everyone on tumblr who told me I had to write this idea into a story. :)

Clint thinks he probably shouldn’t be surprised by anything after having his mind hijacked by a god, saving the world from actual aliens, and eating lunch across from Tony Stark. But even after all of that, he still isn’t expecting Captain America to visit him in the hospital. S.H.I.E.L.D.’s insisted on a 48 hour hold for observation—the official story is that they want to monitor him for a possible head injury after falling through that window. But it isn’t very hard to read between the lines. Apparently they think two days is all it’ll take to ensure he isn’t about to lose his marbles and go on another killing spree. That or it’s a front, and they’re planning on shipping him off to the Fridge after a brief showing of attempted rehabilitation.

Either way, the last thing he expects is to wake up to the Star Spangled Man standing at the foot of his bed. Clint blinks blearily through the haze of painkillers, takes a moment to convince himself that this isn’t a dream.

Steve gives him a nod, which suggests he at least looks coherent enough to engage in conversation. “Agent Barton.”

"Cap," Clint croaks in reply. He sits up and fumbles for the plastic cup of water he remembers Natasha leaving on the bedside table, drinks deeply from it as his back screams in painful protest of the movement. "What are you doing here?"

"Came to see how you were doing," says Steve, moving a few paces closer.

For a moment Clint simply stares at him, fighting down the urge to laugh hysterically. That probably wouldn’t help his case for mental stability. “Why?”

"You’re one of my men." Steve seems to think better of his wording. "One of my teammates. Soldiers should look out for one another."

"Is that what we are?" asks Clint. "Soldiers?" He isn’t sure why any part of him feels the need to give Captain America a hard time. What he really wants to ask is: Why would someone like you give one single fuck about someone like me?

“We fought together,” Steve answers, his good humor apparently unfazed. He pauses for a moment, but seems to be out of things to say now that he’s done his duty. “I’ll let you get back to resting. But you need anything, you just let me know.” He turns to leave.

Clint lets him get most of the way to the door before speaking again. “You know, I had a poster of you on my wall when I was a kid.” It’s mostly a lie--the wall with the poster had been in one of his few early foster homes, and the room it inhabited was never his. He isn’t sure what sort of a response he’s expecting--What _do_ you say to a challenge like that?

“You had a poster of an idea,” says Steve, and leaves without further explanation.

* * *

Clint gets released from the hospital as promised, but two weeks pass before S.H.I.E.L.D. decides to lengthen his leash a bit. He’s cleared by the psych team to go places besides his apartment or HQ--as long as he continues attending therapy every day, and filling out a computer questionnaire every night. As if he’d really check that box, were he losing it again, hearing voices telling him to kill people or jump off of a building. He isn’t, though, except in the echoes of his dreams, and those are easy enough to avoid by just not sleeping much. Natasha doesn’t ask about the new uptick in his coffee habit from one large pot a day to two or three, doesn’t say anything when he wakes sweaty and panting, just sits with him until he gives up and moves to shower.

By the time he gets the clearance to go out in public, he’s developing a raging case of cabin fever. He decides that he needs to get out of his head, needs to stop talking and thinking about his _feelings_. He doesn’t think about where he’s going, just picks a direction and starts walking. The afternoon sun is hot on his back, which is pleasant after the perpetual chill of the Tesseract in his body, the months spent underground in New Mexico. 

He’s almost managed to clear his mind, forget about things for a bit when he turns a corner and very nearly runs up against a barricade of bright yellow Caution tape. Clint sucks in a breath as he realizes he’s wandered into midtown, that this block marks one of the outer bounds of the destruction left in the wake of the Chitauri invasion. 

Clint stands perfectly still, a chill running through him despite the heat as he takes in the scene. The building fronts here have been crushed, gape open like the jagged maw of a monster. In the street, the asphalt is hopelessly cracked, buried in places beneath several feet of debris. There’s a team working, though, civilians as far as he can tell. They’re sorting things into piles, shoveling the largest pieces into the back of a dump truck for removal. Clint wonders whether any of these people are the owners of the ruined buildings, and something in his stomach twists.

“Hey,” a voice cuts in, and Clint jumps. He’s been so caught up in the disaster that he hasn’t noticed the man approaching him. It takes him a moment to recognize Captain America in ripped jeans and a t-shirt stained dark with dirt, but of course he’d be here. Of course he’d want to lead the clean-up efforts.

“Hi,” says Clint, clearing his throat, which suddenly feels scraped by something more than the dust in the air. 

“You come to join in?” asks Steve, taking off his hard hat for a moment and running a hand through his hair. He looks like the world’s most attractive construction foreman, every bit as at home here as he would be on the battlefield.

“I was just--taking a walk,” says Clint, though there’s only so much he can do to swallow down the guilt that’s gnawing away in the pit of his stomach. The truth is that he doesn’t know what to do with himself now. A large part of him wants to fix things, pay for his crimes in a way that has nothing to do with therapy. Suddenly this seems like an answer. “You got a job for one more?”

“Always,” says Steve, holding out a hand to help him across the barricade.

* * *

“I _was_ a soldier,” Clint says the next day, as they make their way through a pile of rubble that used to be someone’s living room, sorting anything worth salvaging into plastic garbage bags before clearing the rest of the area for the dump truck crew. “Before I came to S.H.I.E.L.D.”

Steve looks at him sideways, half his face obscured by a mask that matches the one Clint is wearing, eyes still bright behind plastic safety goggles that look ridiculously flimsy on a super soldier. “I know. I read your personnel file when you were missing. We all did.”

Clint sighs, scooping up a teddy bear that’s lost an arm, stuffing spilling out like very fluffy guts. He wonders if he ought to trash the thing, then thinks better of it and drops the bear into the bag of things to keep. He knows the protocol, knows Fury would have distributed his details to the entire team, but it doesn’t stop the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He feels exposed in a way he hasn’t in years, since he was a kid himself. “Well. Just wanted you to know you weren’t wrong the other day. I guess I was just--in a bad mood.” 

Steve smiles, an expression Clint can’t quite read, and moves back a few paces to begin searching a new area of rubble. “Not a problem. Not sure anyone could blame you for being a little grumpy, all things considered.”

For a few minutes Clint continues working in silence, picking up a few more children’s toys and a tarnished silver ring. These items make his chest feel strangely tight, make him ache with a bizarre mix of sadness and jealousy. He’s never been much of one for sentimental objects, never had the option as a child and found it less painful to avoid, later. Few things are of value to him, aside from his bow. Still he wonders about these things, about the family who owned them. Will these be possessions they’ll be glad to recover, or would they rather have other lost things? Are they even still alive to take stock? He doesn’t think many people died on the streets during the fight, but if he’s honest, all the many costs have begun running together in his head. 

“I’m not like you, though,” says Clint, almost without thinking. He kicks himself mentally: of course he isn’t a genetically altered super soldier from last century. That wasn’t what he meant, though, and he thinks Steve is probably perceptive enough to understand.

“Pardon?” asks Steve, looking up briefly before continuing his work.

“You’re all over the history books, you know?” says Clint. “How you tried to enlist a half dozen times. How you wanted to protect people, wanted to give your service to the war. You were--selfless. Honorable. I was never like that.”

“What makes you say that?” asks Steve, frowning slightly. He doesn’t look disappointed, though, just a little bit curious. “You served, didn’t you?”

“Sure.” Clint drops a crumpled but important-looking paper into his bag and moves to his right. “But I didn’t enlist because I wanted to. I did it because I was out of a job. Broke. Would’ve been homeless and starving if I hadn’t.”

Steve nods curtly. “You wouldn’t be the first. And you did have a choice, technically speaking. You could have turned to crime. You could have done nothing, gotten by on the charity of others. But you chose to serve.”

Clint sighs, an inexplicable irritation flaring. He isn’t quite sure what he wants--for Steve to punish him or forgive him. He isn’t sure what the impulse is that makes him keep pushing, like picking at a scab. “I wasn’t like you in the army, either. I was a sniper. My targets never got to see me, never got to fight back. Sometimes I killed them without knowing their names, their crimes. A lot of times I killed them without ever knowing why.”

Steve only shrugs. “Did you think you were making the world a better place?”

“I don’t know,” Clint sighs, and goes in search of a shovel.

* * *

“Know anything else about it?” asks Clint. “The Tesseract?” They’ve moved on from that first block after a week, returned what they could to the displaced families and made their way over to the next street, which features a whole lot of broken glass in the wreckage of what used to be corporate offices. He thinks there must be a similar scene beneath the window he went through, though his memories of the moments following are particularly hazy.

“Sure,” says Steve. He’s sweeping dust and glass off the tile floor inside a destroyed bank, his silhouette cutting a bizarre image against the backdrop of safe deposit boxes and portraits of board members still clinging to the walls. He looks almost comical with his hard hat, mask, and broom, almost as if he ought to be wearing an apron. “You want a firsthand account of why having it on this planet is a terrible idea?”

“Not particularly,” says Clint, stepping over the frayed ends of severed wires at what he thinks was once a computer terminal. He’s pretty sure the power’s out on this whole block, but the sight of the loose cables still sends a little thrill of danger through him. The heat of the day is oppressive, tendrils of sweat crawling down the back of his neck like the feet of tiny creatures. He wipes them away irritably.

“What were you asking, then?” Steve presses. He seems every bit as impervious to Clint’s bad mood as he did a week ago, immune also to the conditions they’re working in and the sadness of the task. For a moment Clint wonders if it’s a relief for him, having a continued purpose now that the fight’s ended, a definite goal to work towards. 

“I meant--” Clint takes a breath, removes his goggles and swipes the back of one hand across his forehead. “You know anyone else who had it in their head? Who--did things because of it? You know what happened to them afterward?”

“No,” says Steve. He pauses and fixes his gaze on Clint, leaning against handle of the broom. “I’m sorry. Schmidt--the Red Skull--was the last one to use it as a weapon, but I don’t think he or any of his team had it in their head. Not like you did. If it affected him at all, it was because he wanted it to.”

“Perfect,” Clint growls, kicking a pile of debris as anger surges through him. The cloud of dust that rises makes him cough despite his mask, and that feels fitting too. A carnie buffoon next to history’s greatest soldier. A side show freak off his leash. 

“The doctor--Selvig--was under Loki’s control as well,” says Steve, apparently still ignoring that little display of temper. “If you’re looking for someone with shared experiences, he might be your surest bet.”

“That wasn’t my point.” Clint snaps, then forces himself to exhale again. He puts his goggles back on and turns back to his work, deciding it’s probably best to abandon this conversation.

Steve apparently isn’t going to let it drop that easily, though, not now that this thing’s started. “What was your point? I’d like to know.”

“I wanted to know how they’d been punished,” says Clint, suddenly unable to look back up, to see the dismay he’s sure is written all over Captain America’s face, like that damn unattainable poster from his childhood memory looking down on him in judgment. “If anyone had been--taken--like me and survived, I wanted to know how they were punished.”

“Because you think S.H.I.E.L.D. ought to be punishing you?” Steve guesses. “What happened was not your fault. You were a casualty.” He sounds like an echo of Natasha, and Clint feels the anger, the guilt rising again.

“I murdered people,” he explodes. “I killed _my_ teammates! I tried to kill my partner.” He waves a hand up at the place where the roof is gaping open, the destruction outside partly visible from where they’re standing. “This? All of this? All of this is because I helped _him_! Because I couldn’t disobey his orders. You’re all about fairness and honor, right? How can you possibly think it’s fair or honorable for me to just get a free pass!”

“I believe in justice,” says Steve. “I believe that punishing you and Dr. Selvig for crimes that were out of your control would be unjust. And I hardly think that this adds up to a free pass.”

Clint stares at him for a moment, then turns and flees into the street as the walls start to feel like they’re closing in.

* * *

It takes Clint four days of restlessly attempting normalcy before he comes back, decides that he still needs something more, answers he hasn’t asked for yet. The crew’s moved on again and it takes him a while to locate Steve, up on top of an apartment building, securing tarps over the damaged roof. Clint watches for a moment as the wind picks up the far edge of one, then moves in and catches it. 

“Thanks,” says Steve, smiling at him. He doesn’t ask where Clint’s been, doesn’t question his reaction at the bank. Instead he tapes down his edge before tossing the roll over.

“I had something else to ask you,” says Clint, when he’s finished taping too. He gets to his feet and follows Steve over to the next section, the next tarp.

“I thought you might.” Steve hands him one corner and kneels to begin taping an end. “Go ahead.”

“Why did you trust me?” He has to shout a little, to be heard above the wind. “On the Helicarrier, in the infirmary. You trusted me after I tried to take the whole thing down.”

“You didn’t,” Steve insists. “Loki did. Why does it make you angry, being told that what happened wasn’t your fault?”

“Because I don’t understand,” he admits at last. “You’re-- _good_. Everything about you is _good_. If anyone can see the truth about me, it should be you. I want to understand what you see in me so that I can try to be good again too.” It feels ridiculous, having said the words aloud. He has a fleeting half-thought about what it would be like to fling himself off the rooftop, but he knows he never actually will.

Steve is quiet for a moment, then nods slowly, moves closer. “Here’s what you don’t understand. I don’t see people as good or bad. I think everybody has a choice: do the thing that’s good, or do something else. What’s important, what makes us honorable, is choosing the good whenever possible. But you didn’t have a choice then. When you did, what you chose was to fight beside me. What you’re choosing now is to clean up the damage. I can’t tell you what you’ll choose next.”

“So what do _you_ want?” asks Clint, finally. It’s the one question he hasn’t thought of before, and he feels a little silly, more than a little selfish. “What do you see in me, if it isn’t a monster?”

“A teammate,” Steve says again, just as sure as that first time in the hospital. “A friend.” 

There’s something a bit raw to that last, something that reminds Clint just how young Steve was when he was buried under the ice. And maybe that’s all there is to it, he thinks. Maybe that’s what they’ve all been seeking, the only real absolution they can ever give each other. He’s gotten so carried away looking for the judgments of gods everywhere, he’s almost managed to forget that everyone around him now is human, that Steve is just another man looking for answers of his own. 

“Okay,” he says finally, looking up at the horizon, where the sun’s starting to sink lower. He can still feel the guilt weighing him down, the sadness at the hurt he’s helped cause. But he thinks he’s beginning to see the possibilities now, too. “It’s almost dinnertime, you know. Anyone give you a tour of twenty-first century food yet? Because that is something I could do.”

A slow grin spreads over Steve’s face, as he finishes securing the last of the tarps, a glint of surprising humor in his eyes. “That would be a great service.”

* * *


End file.
